Thanks for the link. I will definitely look into neem oil. Sorry I took so long to reply. After I did that strenuous project I went onto another one...TAXES! lol totally drained me in more ways than one. I've grown Golden Bantam before. It's very small. Funny there's a 3 Stooges episode where Curly was biting on the cuckoo clock's weights and after Moe confronts him he say he thought it was Golden Bantam which is about the same size.

What a wonderful thread! LONG! It was from my mothers stories about living on the farm when she was a girl that I got my farminess. My family has a story telling tradition and she was the one who carried it along for so many years and then handed it down to me. She passed in 1984. I still ask her questions about my animals. It seems to jog my memory. Either that or I'm just plain nuts! :) Mom was born in 1912 near Sheridan, IL. She was the youngest girl in her family. There were 8 children. Five boys and three girls. My grandfather paired the kids up to bring in the crops and take care of the animals. She and her "baby" brother, Bob, did mostly corn picking and husking. It was a large farm and her father worked them hard. But it was her work away from work that made her happy. When she was old enough she asked her dad to let her take care of the animals when they got sick to see if she could save them. He told her that she could do it on one condition and that was that she must keep up with the other work just as she always had. If he felt that she was slowing down because of the sick ones, then he'd make her quit. She kept up. Her sisters didn't want to make their skin and hands look worse than they already did from working outside and she really wanted to take care of the animals. She had a bum lamb named Peggy that she raised in the kitchen beside the wood cookstove. She said that when the warm weather came, Peggy followed her everywhere, including into the house... Until her mother told her, "No more!" She slept all night(s) in the brooder house until all the babies had hatched. Just to make sure that everyone was okay. Then there was a mare that had gotten tangled up in some barbed wire and was in bad shape. Her father and uncle were going to shoot it, but she begged him to please let her try to save it. He just barely agreed and they called a vet to come and sew the horse up. I can't remember the number of stitches now, there were many, many stitches holding the torn up horse together. Everyone warned her that the horse was going to die. But she slept in the barn every night and took care of her until she had healed up. The mare lived and was given to my mom as her own. She named her Fly because of the way they could fly across the ground when she rode her. One day one of the neighboring farm ladies came to my grandparents house and told them that it was unseemly for that red haired girl to be racing that horse around bare back with her legs showing. Mom said that she forgot to complain about her pig tails flying out behind her. When Mom was 20 she went to Chicago on her own to take nurses training. She became a nurse and met my father, eventually, changed her religion and her entire family banished her for it. She was actually disowned. Only her baby brother, Bob, came to see her and invited our family to his home. None of us children ever knew anyone else in her family. Since the family farm had been long since "lost" during the depression, it no longer belonged to anyone in her family when I was a child . The family who lived there allowed Mom to bring us kids to the farm and we walked the woods digging up wild flowers to take home and plant around our house in town. We walked the dirt road and she stopped beside a very small pile of what turned out to be wood. It had been a hog pen when she was a girl. She had to slop the hogs there and had hated it. Apparently there was one very mean sow there who she got into a disagreement with one day. She took us through the barn and through the house showing us the rooms where the kids had slept and telling us more stories. There are many, many stories. I won't tell so much here, but that gives you an idea of how farminess entered my heart and soul. I could no more live without this way of life than I could live without breathing. We had to live in town when I was a kid, but we had lots of animals and spent a lot of time in the country. Usually one of us dragged home some poor torn up or hit animal and Mom taught us how to treat them and care for them. One of my sisters and I have lived on farms as adults. There was our family home place in TN and then my sis had a farm in southern PA. I still have my animals even though the town city limits have swallowed up our property. I love reading your stories. I'd love to read more of them. I wonder if there's a way to have our stories self published... An idea... :) Please tell more! And more! I just love to read them. :) Maggie chickenmama1

I used to work on a ranch as a teen. One day when I went to catch some of the horses in the pasture, I came up on them in a clearing and... there were waaay too many of them, lol. Sure enough, an entire herd of deer were grazing along with them, interspersed amongst the horses and not seemingly afraid at all (they were full-grown, though). Great story, weeper! Sadly, my in-laws have now found two deer near their yard that have succumbed to starvation this winter, so I like to hear the happy tales. We have loads of deer around here, but it's very rare that they come inside the treeline around our yard, likely because of our dog.

See that fence? The white goat on the far side of it is inside the pasture. The goats in the foreground are all doing what ever they want. Darn goats, want to be wild and free. Just one more day after today and finally we'll be able to start taking off the electric fence and putting up goat fencing. The fence is pretty weak right now, not sure why. It's working, but just not very strong pulse. I'm just hoping the cows aren't smart enough to try it because those gals will be pain to round up. Don't tell my teenage son that I had enough time to grab the camera as I ran out to round them up, but didn't have enough time to put on my boots over his socks that I am wearing. :)